Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Water always wins. The question is whether we let it cool the planet while it does — or keep fighting it until there's nothing left to fight with.
Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, and is currently writing her second book, Roots to Sky: How Life and Water Can Help Cool Earth's Climate, due in 2028. She is an environmental journalist who has spent more than a decade travelling the world to document how communities are rebuilding their relationship with water — not by controlling it better, but by understanding what water wants and working with it.
The common climate narrative — decarbonise, bring fossil fuel emissions to zero, done — is no longer sufficient on its own. Water vapour accounts for roughly half the greenhouse effect. We've degraded 75% of the earth's land surface, largely by draining it. And more sea level rise comes from pumping groundwater than from melting glaciers — something a 1970 MIT Press report already knew. We've only accelerated since.
The good news: this is something we can change relatively quickly through land restoration. And water is absolutely key.
In this episode:
— Why water always wins and what it means to ask what water wants rather than fighting it
— How growing up in California, built on extreme water engineering, shaped Erica's obsession
— Why she shifted from surface water to the atmosphere for her new book Roots to Sky
— The 1970 MIT report that flagged pumping groundwater raises sea levels — 55 years of acceleration since
— Why 87% of wetlands drained, two thirds of rivers dammed, and cities doubled since 1992 have made our water problems worse, not better
— Why the best water solutions are modular and decentralised — and why that's empowering
— What beavers in California are teaching farmers who spent eighty years shooting them
— Why investors optimising single variables are running out of natural buffers faster than they think
— Why land back for indigenous peoples may be one of the highest-return interventions available
— Her magic wand answer: caring for non-humans — and why she thinks we're closer to it than it seems.
More about this episode.
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Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
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An orange farm near Valencia, abandoned for a decade, a family debt, and a website. Seventeen years later: 500,000 customers, 350 partner farmers, 400 employees, and not a single discount ever run.
Gonzalo Úrculo is co-founder of Crowdfarming, the direct-to-consumer platform that connects European consumers directly with farmers — no wholesaler, no distributor, no price negotiation after harvest. He came back from his Erasmus in Berlin, talked his family out of selling the grandfather's farm, and spent the first two years renting a van to sell oranges face-to-face at markets in Paris and Berlin. The record before a Guardian article ran in 2012 was 20 orders a day. The day it ran: 240. The website collapsed.
The mechanic behind everything that followed is almost offensively simple: fruit is only picked when it is ordered. A Valencia orange reaches a kitchen in Germany in three to four days. The same orange through a conventional supply chain — including the organic one — takes a minimum of seventeen.
We walked the original citrus field together, trees all around us carrying name tags of their adopted owners somewhere in Germany, France, and Austria, and talked about the argument Gonzalo makes that gets him in trouble at French farming conferences.
In this episode:
— How the tree adoption model was invented by customers who showed up unannounced to visit their trees
— Why the business-plan target was 1,000 adoptions and they hit 10,000 in under a year
— Why customers forgive almost anything if you communicate honestly and in advance
— How picking only to order cuts waste structurally — not as a policy but as a consequence of the model
— Why predictable pre-season income is the one thing that makes regenerative transition economically rational for a farmer
— Why CAP subsidies are not going to farmers — they're going to supermarkets
— What Gonzalo would do with €1 billion, and why his magic wand answer is the same thing he built his entire company around
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

200 euros in a bank account, no contract, and a vision. Six and a half years later: 160,000 trees, a soil temperature at 15cm depth of a constant 21°C — while the bare field metres away peaks at 38°C — and a landscape so full of birds that visitors ask to walk through it in silence.
Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, is German agroforestry practitioner who spent nine months on Ernst Götsch's farm in Brazil, arrived in Portugal's Alentejo with almost nothing, and has been quietly building what he calls a Montado-plus, adding the missing layers back into Europe's most famous silvopasture system, ever since.
We walk the land together, step outside the gate to stand in the bare control field metres away, and talk about what six and a half years of syntropic-inspired practice actually looks like when it works. Including why eucalyptus, widely considered a villain in the Portuguese landscape, might be one of the most generous trees in it.
In this episode:
— How a student group got Wageningen University to fund Ernst Götsch's first visit to Northern Europe
— Starting a farm with 200 euros, no contract, and acorns gathered by hand for six weeks
— Why the Montado's structure is ecologically upside down and what restoring it does to temperature, water, and biodiversity
— Why eucalyptus is not the problem — and how to use it to grow a native forest
— How to prune cork and holm oaks so they actually thrive
— Why in these systems, one plus one equals three or, as someone put it, syntropic farming is measured in cubic metres, not square metres
— What Marc would do with €1 billion, and why his magic wand answer is a shift in mindset rather than a farming practice
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, left Greece a decade ago, spent years working across European farming systems, and eventually landed in Portugal to run what has become one of the most rigorously monitored regenerative trials in Mediterranean intensive tree crop agriculture. He is the lead on the field research side of the Arbo-Innova project, a multi-farm, multi-consortium research platform focused specifically on the question of whether regenerative practices can be meaningfully integrated into the intensive orchard systems that now cover hundreds of thousands of hectares across the Iberian Peninsula.
A five-hectare plot of intensive almonds at Monta Silveira Farm, in Portugal, fenced against deer, planted at the same density as the conventional neighbours surrounding it on all sides, and now in its third growing season: that is where this conversation takes place. The trees are about two metres tall. The interlines are green with different cover crop mixes. One area is under plastic mulch; another has clovers growing in the tree lines themselves. The data is beginning to come in, and what it is showing — on nitrogen levels inside the tree, on herbicide use, on fungal disease pressure, on water infiltration — is quietly shifting the conversations Dimitri is having with an industry that, until recently, was mostly watching from a distance.
In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded at 8am on a May morning in Portugal, birds audible throughout, with the 8,000 hectares of conventional intensive almonds next door visible at every turn, we get into why cover cropping can fail spectacularly at 70 euros a hectare and why that matters enormously for adoption, what clovers on the tree berm are doing to nitrogen inside the almond tree (and what they’re competing for in return), why the most intellectually honest conventional growers are the ones leaning in first, how the J-curve of regenerative transition can be quantified and eventually financed, and why the real metric of progress might be the moment a farmer asks you to slow down.
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

João Valente, owner of Monte Silveira, took over his family farm in central-eastern Portugal that was running on tobacco, broccoli, and melons with sixty-five people employed year-round, the rotation designed entirely around subsidies. When the tobacco subsidy disappeared at the end of the 1990s, he found himself with a question: what does this land actually want to be? That question led him to organic agriculture conferences in Portugal, to a magazine showing no-till, to a German seed company that flew him to New Zealand and Australia to see holistic planned grazing in action, and eventually to the first Climate Farmers Congress in a castle in Germany, back in 2021, where he helped write the manifesto, brought ham, wine, and olive oil, and met much of the regenerative agriculture network he’s been working with ever since. Today, Monte Silveira manages around 700 hectares of Montado and irrigated annual crops, runs five species of animals, carries sixteen active research projects, has three full-time scientists on staff, and has been no-till since the year 2000.
One plus one, in companion cropping, is not two. It might be three, four, or five: two or three species in the same field, each supporting the others, the vetch fixing nitrogen for the wheat, the wheat stem holding up the climbing vetch, and if one fails the other covers it. João has been doing this long enough now that the yield comparisons with neighbouring monoculture fields aren’t theoretical. And after decades of absorbing the risk alone, he’s at a point where he can start handing the knowledge on, to neighbouring farmers who are curious but can’t afford to fail, to the Portuguese government, which recently invited Monte Silveira to one of only three private companies at the table for the country’s seven-year environmental strategy document, and to consumers through brands, built on cereals and legumes priced to compete with conventional supermarket products, not just to sell to those who can already afford the premium.
In this episode, recorded under the shade of an old farm building during a May heat wave in the Portugal, too hot by then to keep walking the Montado, we get into how a tobacco subsidy became the turning point of a farming life, why João thinks the two groups most drawn to regenerative research are newly graduated scientists and recently retired professors (and almost nobody in between), what it takes to bring the most important conventional almond consultant in Portugal from sceptic to practitioner in under a year, why he would mandate no-till for all dry-land cereal producers in Portugal if he had the legislative pen, what he’d do with a billion euros, and why, given a magic wand, he’d change human ego before he’d change a single farming practice.
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!